As of 2015, 43 peace operations had deployed to 15 different African countries. Africa’s increasing efforts to support its own peace operations have led to African peace and security organisations both leading on, and contributing the mainstay of personnel to, these missions. This paper examines a number of African peace operations and analyses the evolution of the mission mandates. A selection of four representative peace operations – Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Somalia, and Darfur – which differ in terms of timeframe, implementing authority, size and conflict dynamics are examined to assess patterns, trends and anomalies of mandates over the life cycle of their missions.Academic and policy-related literature places emphasis on the impact of UN Security Council geopolitics, roles and responsibilities supporting civilian protection, the AU’s financial, materiel and human resource deficiencies, and the role of peacebuilding. However, little has been written on the evolution of wider peace mission mandates as well as the role of African organisations in developing these mandates.

This paper analyzes the African Union (AU)’s normative framework on Unconstitutional Changes of Government (UCG), and is intended to serve three purposes: to trace the origins of the norm, identifying the major gaps; to review the AU’s implementation and enforcement of the norm; and to discuss potential means for reconciling the identified gaps between the norm and practice.

Much of the focus of the other reviews of AU peace operations has been on what this report calls instruments, the decision-making mechanisms and the tools that the AU has developed and used over the years. As it can be gathered from its title, ‘African politics, African Peace’ on the other hand puts singular emphasis on and dedicates considerable space to politics, particularly Africa’s politics of peace. This is given expression and best captured through what the report calls the primacy of the political. While similar language has been used in the HIPPO report, the scope and content of the primacy of the political in this report is different.

By Mulugeta Gebrehiwot and Alex de Waal. Published by the Guardian on Thursday, July 21, 2016.

The African Union thrives or fails according to how successful it is in preventing and resolving conflict. Over the past 14 years, since its foundational meeting in Durban, South Africa, the AU has constructed an impressive […]